I’m with krueg here. Owner collusion gets you oligarchs keeping salaries down, blackballing players whose behavior they don’t like, etc, but only around those issues and positions where they have a shared position across the board, because all it takes is one owner to “go rogue” on a given issue/position and the collusion falls apart.
On the other hand, throwing a game for money takes nothing more than one pitcher, one umpire, or a couple key players to essentially destroy the integrity of the outcome.
So there is an issue of how easy it is to pull these things off and how damaging the result is to the sport. On both those counts I think game-throwing is worse than owner collusion.
Taken from a different moral lens, take the principle of universalizing a given act – Kant’s categorical imperative if my fuzzy college-philosophy-course brain serves me correctly.
If everyone in the sport engaged in any of the above 4 activities, it would clearly be bad, but only one of them in that scenario would entirely negate the legitimacy of the sport (assuming that in scenario B at least some people would be betting on their own team and therefore not have any incentive to play to lose, whereas scenario D explicitly makes clear that the goal is to lose). If you universalized D, players would be competing to lose games. The entire foundation on which baseball – or any sport for that matter – is built (i.e. people competing to WIN something) would be turned inside out. It would be worse than pro-wrestling because at least there is a pre-planned winner in WWF matches so there is still the showmanship and spectacle of it all, for pre-teens and others who like that kind of thing.
An action that subverts the very goal of the sport – and not just that imbalances the field of competition or creates unfair barriers to entry – seems to me the worst action. So I go with D.